Time Magazine confirmed yesterday the release of a new NFT collection that offers “unlimited access” to its website until 2023. The NFTs are called “TIMEPieces” and there are 4,676 tokens tied to digital artworks, all of them being priced at 0.1 ETH or about $310.
The pieces were sold out in minutes.
But the sales have also led to problems on the Ethereum blockchain as its fees increased. The problem reached such heights that users spent four times more on transaction fees than on the actual NFTs. One address spent $70,000 for 10 NFTs.
The plan was for NFTs to go on sale at a set time and those interested would have to stay ready.
But even when we aren’t talking about crypto this system doesn’t work as the market is inundated by automated bots that buy the supply in seconds, be it concert tickets or sneaker releases. This leads to scalping.
Naturally, this has happened here too as the 100 addresses with the most NFTs are owning 24% of the total supply.
This has happened also due to the “priority fee” of the Ethereum blockchain in which people can cut in line if they choose to pay more to have their transaction processed first.
In fact, people don’t even know what they’ve actually bought – the collection simply points to a red Time logo with the actual reveal taking place today at 6 pm Eastern on OpenSea.